It is not uncommon for a customer of a service provider, such as an Internet service provider or a long-distance telephone service provider, to obtain and maintain multiple accounts, either simultaneously or at different periods of time. Service providers often find it desirable to match such multiple customer accounts with the single customer. This customer identification enables the service provider to ensure continuity in the type of service provided to the customer, to identify highly valued customers and/or to identify less desirable customers or customers with delinquent accounts. Traditional information, such as name and address, are usually used to perform the customer account matching. This method of account matching suffers from certain disadvantages.
More particularly, it is often difficult for the service providers to perform the account matching on their own existing data. Therefore, service providers usually provide account information to outside vendors who are paid to perform matching against their databases. Since the service providers cannot utilize existing data to perform the matching, they must incur the cost of hiring outside vendors to perform the task. In addition, it is often difficult for the outside vendors to match multiple accounts belonging to a single customer using traditional identifying information, since this information is often entered differently for each account and is subject to frequent errors in data entry. In sum, this method for customer account matching is costly, and often inaccurate.
Therefore, a method and apparatus for tracking the connection of customers of a service provider are needed which would enable the service provider to easily and accurately track customer movement or connection. The present invention was developed to accomplish these and other objectives.